Bestselling Writer Has An Excellent Reason For Publishing A Short Story On Twitter

British novelist David Mitchell
is an expert when it comes to characters, but not writing 140
characters at a time. Nevertheless, he's written his latest work
for Twitter, publishing the short story in 140-character tweets
because that's how he wants you to read it.

Mitchell, whose novels "number9dream"
and "Cloud
Atlas" were shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize, admitted
he's not a huge fan of Twitter. "I'm not really a social media
animal," he told the BBC World
Service radio station. "I like my privacy. Post Snowden we
know that there's enough people to want to take our privacy away
without voluntarily helping them. I don't want to add to this
ocean of trivia and irrelevance."

Mitchell only created a Twitter account in the first place after
his publicist convinced him that it would help promote his
upcoming novel "The
Bone Clocks." But he wanted to offer his Twitter followers
something more. "It still kind of bothered me a little bit that I
was using this Arab Spring-sized technology just to basically
say, 'Hi, I'm going off on the road, come and see me, buy my
book.' It just seemed a bit cheesy, really, so I thought, 'How
can I find a use for it?'"

The story, "The Right Sort," is narrated by a teen tripping
on his mother's Valium pills for the first time. The boy's
experience of the world on Valium is "a sequence of nice little
throbs and pulses," which he likes because it's more orderly,
Mitchell said. "Those are the tweets. He's basically thinking in
tweets because of the Valium."

He admits publishing his short story on Twitter is a clever
marketing tool for his unrelated upcoming novel. But Mitchell
also hopes his short bursts of tweets will provide a stronger
reading experience than the traditional method.

"With Twitter it's less like a
balloon flight where you look down and see the text and more like
sort of a train ride with a very narrow window through rapidly
changing landscapes and tunnels," he said. "You can't see it all
at once."

"The Right Sort" will be
comprised of 280 tweets over the course of a week,
The Guardian reports. Mitchell has been tweeting since early
this week and will continue posting bursts of 20 tweets each day
through the weekend.

Here's one of his recent tweets.

I wait. Silence. Just my breaths, the empty passage, running
down the side. The brambles move like hungry underwater things.

Mitchell admitted writing his short story for a Twitter
audience was challenging. He compared the narrow
confines of a 140-character tweet to a straight jacket, but
acknowledged that it helped him write a story that was new for
him.